Steve Case Quotes

#1. People often ask why I left CNN - I didn't like management. I liked my colleagues in the news gathering but the corporate culture that seized management when AOL came in (Steve Case and Gerry Levin) was disgusting.

Greta Van Susteren

#2. Remember when those CD-ROMs from AOL came in the mail almost every day? The company was considered ubiquitous, invincible. Former AOL CEO Steve Case was no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg.

Douglas Rushkoff

#3. There are lots of cycles to markets - boom and bust - and also in perceptions of people. The conventional wisdom of Steve Case as genius or fool was highly cyclical. The truth was always in the middle.

Steve Case

#4. Think about this: It was illegal for most people to connect to the internet before 1992.

Steve Case

#5. Nowadays people seem to switch schools, either because they have to, and certain schools only serve certain grades, or because they move to a different place or have some particular interest, but I was in the same school for 13 years.

Steve Case

#6. Five or ten years ago, when it was clear the Internet was becoming a mainstream phenomenon, it was equally clear that a lot of people were being left out and could be left behind.

Steve Case

#7. Keep your eye on the prize and focus on your mission. Remember what you're trying to do, what your value is, why it's important, and at the same time, change course and direction. If the market's telling you different things how are you going to adjust to that?

Steve Case

#8. I continue to have a special pride and passion for AOL, and I strongly believe that AOL - once the leading Internet company in the world - can return to its past greatness.

Steve Case

#9. You shouldn't focus on why you can't do something, which is what most people do. You should focus on why perhaps you can, and be one of the exceptions.

Steve Case

#10. There has never been a failure of a currency board anywhere in the world. These are tough systems, and when I say they are foolproof, that's exactly the case.

Steve Hanke

#11. There are no road signs to help navigate. And, in fact, no one has yet determined which side of the road we're supposed to be on.

Steve Case

#12. In football, you can never say anything is certain. The benchmark is 38-40 points. That has always been the case. That will never change.

Steve Bruce

#13. At the end of the day, the team you build is the company you build.

Steve Case

#14. From a relatively early age I got interested in business.

Steve Case

#15. In every case, you must ensure that the organization is really ready to have desired behaviors happen on day one and become business as usual. If you do that, you can feel confident that

Steve Jacobs

#16. I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check. If that was the case, Microsoft would have great products.

Steve Jobs

#17. Most of the people who had PCs did not have modems and could not use those PCs as communicating devices. They really were using them for spreadsheets or word processing or storing recipes or playing games or what have you.

Steve Case

#18. It's not about how to get started; it's about how to get noticed.

Steve Case

#19. Steve Jobs made the case to Xerox PARC execs directly that they had great technology but that Apple knew how to make it affordable enough to change the world. This was very open. In the end, Xerox got a large block of Apple stock for sharing the technology. That's not stealing outright.

Steve Wozniak

#20. It's often the case that when a critic uses an embarrassingly accurate term to describe what a wrong-doer is doing, the wrong-doer protests: "Why don't you use my white-washed, conscience-soothing euphemism?" Such euphemisms, they claim, help promote "civilized debate."

Steve Kangas

#21. You don't understand," she said meekly. "Really? Okay, you're a special case then, are you? Unlike all the others in abusive relationships, your man really does love you. He's a good man deep down. Tells you he'll change.

Steve McHugh

#22. In the end, a vision without the ability to execute it is probably a hallucination.

Steve Case

#23. We lose money on signing up the customers where there's some marketing costs associated with giving them a free month. It doesn't much matter whether you make a little bit or lose a little bit.. as you well know, because you lose a ton on every copy of The Washington Post (newspaper).

Steve Case

#24. [On swinging for the fences] Ultimately, you have the potential to build a significant business with the potential to have a positive impact on millions of people's lives.

Steve Case

#25. My father and his brothers were all lawyers, so I think that the expectation was probably for me to grow up to be an attorney, but it never really fascinated me that much. I was more interested in building things.

Steve Case

#26. I think it took us nine years to get one million subscribers to AOL, and then in the next nine years we went from one million to 35 million.

Steve Case

#27. Disruption is about risk-taking.
But then you become a Fortune
500 company, which is about risk
mitigation

Steve Case

#28. One of the problems with computers, particularly for the older people, is they were befuddled by them, and the computers have gotten better. They have gotten easier to use. They have gotten less expensive. The software interfaces have made things a lot more accessible.

Steve Case

#29. You have to get along with people, but you also have to recognize that the strength of a team is different people with different perspectives and different personalities.

Steve Case

#30. It's stunning to me what kind of an impact even one person can have if they have the right passion, perspective and are able to align the interest of a great team.

Steve Case

#31. The Internet will make every enterprise a publisher.

Steve Case

#32. And I'd say one of the great lessons I've learned over the past couple of decades, from a management perspective, is that really when you come down to it, it really is all about people and all about leadership.

Steve Case

#33. So we believed that strategic alliances and partnerships were critical, and we did that for five years.

Steve Case

#34. It's usually human drama that carries with it issues of race or class that attracts me. That was certainly the case with 'No Crossover.'

Steve James

#35. I enjoyed high school and college, and I think I learned a lot, but that was not really my focus. My focus was on trying to figure out what businesses to start.

Steve Case

#36. The idea that maybe you don't have to own a car if you only need one occasionally may catch on, just like time-sharing caught on in real estate.

Steve Case

#37. I do think that a general liberal arts education is very important, particularly in an uncertain changing world.

Steve Case

#38. I think the support of the other team at AOL and everybody's really shared passion and belief about this and - saying that some day everybody was going to be on line.

Steve Case

#39. Nobody should have to be a systems integrator to make a convergence network work in their home.

Steve Case

#40. I was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Steve Case

#41. One of the biggest challenges we had in the first decade was not that many people had personal computers. There weren't that many people to sell to, and it was hard to identify them.

Steve Case

#42. Because I do think - not just in building AOL - but just the world in which we live is a very confusing, rapidly changing world where technology has accelerated.

Steve Case

#43. The attackers are the people with bold, innovative ideas, who are trying to disrupt the status quo, and usher in a better way. We need to think out of the box, and be curious, and be willing to take risks.

Steve Case

#44. All great ideas start as weird ideas. What now seems obvious, early on, is not obvious to anybody.

Steve Case

#45. The argument could be made that the word 'hero' is overused. I do not think, however, that this is the case when referring to teachers.

Steve Maraboli

#46. I want to find people who have had to work hard and who have learned from their failures. Perseverance is no guarantee you'll succeed, but without it, it's almost guaranteed you won't.

Steve Case

#47. Ask for feedback from people with diverse backgrounds. Each one will tell you one useful thing. If you're at the top of the chain, sometimes people won't give you honest feedback because they're afraid. In this case, disguise yourself, or get feedback from other sources.

Steve Jobs

#48. When I first got started in the late '70s, early '80s, and first was thinking about the interactive world, I believed so fervently that it was the next big thing, I thought it would happen quickly.

Steve Case

#49. If you believe that some day it's going to happen, some day it probably will happen. You just have to make sure you're there when it's happening, and ideally you're at the front of the parade, and the principle beneficiary of when it happens.

Steve Case

#50. We don't want to turn the TV into a computer.

Steve Case

#51. I had an older brother who passed away recently, an older sister and a younger brother.

Steve Case

#52. What I have figured out is that I can predict the future. I just can't predict when.

Steve Case

#53. It's silly for me to raise expectations too much, but I think I'm right on the basic trend, which is shifting power to consumers.

Steve Case

#54. The pace of change and the threat of disruption creates tremendous opportunities ...

Steve Case

#55. My father still is a lawyer, and my mom was a teacher and then later a career counselor.

Steve Case

#56. I wouldn't have really committed myself to any kind of spiritual lifestyle, I don't think, if I had not endured great suffering. I think that's the case with a lot of people.

Steve-O

#57. Frankly, I like new things. I feel like I made a contribution to building a more interactive world. And I'm proud of that.

Steve Case

#58. You really need to believe that you are on to something important.

Steve Case

#59. I like ... what I characterize as more built-to-last ideas rather than built-to-flip ideas.

Steve Case

#60. I came out of the private sector, a life that I enjoyed. I sleep in a bed every night with a woman I went to first grade with. I wasn't running for a job. I was running - and I think you will find this to be the case with many of the freshmen - to produce results.

Steve Southerland

#61. The woman I am currently crazy about was a vegetarian for a year until I started dating her. As is the case with most vegetarians, she had never eaten properly prepared meat, only commercially packaged or otherwise abused flesh.

Steve Albini

#62. If you don't have both of them working together in a complementary, cohesive way, you're not going to be successful.

Steve Case

#63. Having a great idea is important. But having a great team is also important.

Steve Case

#64. Relationships shouldn't be disposable. If there's something worth saving - not always the case, some relationships are irreconcilable - but if there is something that you determine is worth saving, then try to do that.

Steve Carell

#65. And what we did with this new company in 1985 is we did start focusing on PCs instead of video game machines, because we learned the hard lesson about bringing a product to market in a consumer world where it's very expensive to build a brand and get distribution and so forth.

Steve Case

#66. But the idea that some day people would want to be able to interact and get stock quotes and talk with other people or all these different things, I just believed that was going to happen.

Steve Case

#67. At Revolution Health Group we will put consumers back at the center of the system by giving them more choice, control and convenience.. while building the first comprehensive, consumer-driven health care company.

Steve Case

#68. So you have to force yourself out of a comfort zone and really try to figure out what are the key ingredients, the key skill sets, the key perspectives that are necessary, and then figure out a way to attract the very best people to fill those particular roles.

Steve Case

#69. So my degree was in political science, which I think was - the closest I could come to marketing is politics.

Steve Case

#70. The only way to continue to have a robust economy is to out-innovate other nations.

Steve Case

#71. I was not an outstanding student. I did a reasonable amount of work. I got generally good - pretty good grades, but I was not that passionate about getting straight A's.

Steve Case

#72. You're not just trying to do something marginally, incrementally better. You're doing something that is a fundamental paradigm shift, that will have exponential impact. That means it's harder to do, but ultimately, if it's successful, the impact it has is far greater.

Steve Case

#73. For better or worse, that is true with any new innovation, certainly any new technological innovation. There's many good things that come out of it, but also some bad things. All you can do is try to maximize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff.

Steve Case

#74. If you really got the right people, and you've got them working together as a team, whether it's in business, whether it's in science, whether it's in politics, you can make a big difference.

Steve Case

#75. And so the idea was, well maybe you can take an Atari video game machine, where people plug in a game cartridge, and plug in a modem, and tie that into a telephone, and essentially turn that game in the machine into an interactive terminal.

Steve Case

#76. If you can build a company and make money, great. But eventually, my intention is to give all my money away. I told my kids that. [Wealth] is not particularly helpful to kids. It's almost a burden. It's better to allow them to do their own thing and have their own successes.

Steve Case

#77. If you're doing something new you've got to have a vision. You've got to have a perspective. You've got to have some north star you're aiming for, and you just believe somehow you'll get there, which kind of gets to the passion point.

Steve Case

#78. Anything is possible if you put your mind to it and you really work
hard.

Steve Case

#79. I do think actually in this case the government does get credit for funding some of the basic research.

Steve Case

#80. At AOL, we thought the killer app was people

Steve Case